Yale historian Jonathan Holloway examines the 1930s as a decade of both hardship and political innovation for African Americans. The lecture opens with the Great Depression and the New Deal's mixed material and symbolic impact on black communities, then turns to the Black Cabinet, an informal group of African American advisers within Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Holloway covers the Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine black teenagers were wrongly convicted of rape in Alabama, and the Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaigns organized by the New Negro Alliance in Washington, D.C. to press for hiring in black neighborhoods. He argues that these efforts, along with new black political organizing during the Depression, laid groundwork for the civil rights movement that followed. This is lecture eleven of Yale's course American History: From Emancipation to the Present, recorded in 2010, structured around chapter markers on the New Deal, the Black Cabinet, Scottsboro, and the New Negro Alliance.